Re(2): Re(2): SC - Re: Butchery

[Sue Wensel]

Anne Marie wrote:
>In the 12th century, common peasants knew how to butcher. Alexander 
>Neckham  (_Daily LIving in the 12th Century_ by Urban Tigner Holmes Jr) 
>carefully lists all the things that a peasant should have. This list 
>includes many kinds of livestock, many of which (except the mules) we 
>have recipes for their use as food. I find it very unlikely that the 
>peasant would have livestock and then call in a butcher from the city to 
>kill and dismember said beasties. The same treaatise discusses the 
>butchers in Paris, though, so one thinks that perhaps city dwellers 
>didn't raise their own livestock and so bought already dead meat bits.

>Livestock, according ot Holmes, were driven into town and then butchered 
>as needed by professional guilded butchers. I guess this means that some 
>city slicker could go through life without ever killing a chicken of 
>their own, but most people in the middle ages were not city slickers, and 
>so most would have been responsible for the butchering of their own 
>livestock.

I am afraid I can not agree with this premise.  To take this further, we must
then assume that because farmers grew wheat, they all did their own milling,
when we know this not to be true.  Undoubtedly, some farmers grew their own
livestock and butchered it and some grew their own grain and milled it. 
However, I also think it likely that some took livestock to butchers to be
killed and/or cut up. 


Derdriu